A little about me. I am a writer from the hills of Southeastern Virginia. I’ve held many jobs from which I have been fired many times. At various points in my life I have been:

A construction worker.

A bouncer.

A landscaper.

A deck hand on a scallop fishing boat.

A farm-hand.

A retail manager. (I actually quit that one before I went viral.)

And currently I am a mortuary assistant at a funeral home.

But through it all I was always a writer. A storyteller. Even before I was published. I’ve tried my hands at a few different genres. I wrote horror short stories that didn’t sell. I wrote two urban fantasy novels that sold poorly. The fault for that lies with me not the publisher. I wrote a few sci-fi stories that technically sold but I only got paid for one of them. I’m still waiting for the check for the other two. It wasn’t until I started writing crime and mystery that I saw a modicum of what you might, if you squinted really hard, call success. If I’m being honest it shouldn’t be that much of a shock to me that crime writing was where I finally found my niche.

I grew up behind an illegal bar in a single wide mobile home. By the time I was thirteen I was hopping the fence and sneaking in drinking warm beer and playing pool for a dollar a point. My dad’s side of my family liked fast cars and fast money. My mom’s side were famous for their hair trigger tempers and smart sarcastic mouths.

It would seem I was born into this.

MY DARKEST PRAYERis a love letter of sorts. It’s a heartfelt missive to the place I was raised. A place that has seen it share of ugliness but still somehow retains a fragile beauty. It’s an emotional thank you to the books and authors that shaped or warped depending on your point of view, my young mind. Writers like Himes and Chandler and MacDonald. Ross and John D. Mosely and Crais. It’s rough and brutal and humorous and hopefully ultimately moving. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. I just wanted to write something that you wouldn’t mind taking for a spin.

The main character of MY DARKEST PRAYER is Nathan Waymaker. A biracial former Marine and Sheriff’s deputy who works at his cousin’s funeral home. Nathan spends most of his time cleaning the hearse, wiping down coffins and breaking up fights that break out at funerals. However, if the price is right and he likes the cut of your jib he might be willing to help with a problem. The kind of problem you can’t take to the police. Maybe your daughter is trapped in a crack house but you don’t want your wife to know how far your little girl has fallen. Perhaps you think a well-liked janitor is too touchy-feely with the kids at the daycare center but you can’t prove it. Nathan will lend you a hand. Or a fist.

Maybe you think the police are dragging their feet investigating the murder of your pastor. As the book opens Nathan finds himself asked to poke around said murder and keep an eye on the cops. Sounds like an easy payday, right?

If it was this wouldn’t be much of a detective book now would it?

I want to thank Dan Malmon and everyone at Crimespree for giving me this time to pontificate like a Baptist minister on bath salts but it’s time for me to get back to my day job. I hope you will give MY DARKEST PRAYER a chance. If you like reading it half as much as I liked writing it, I think you will be incredibly happy.

Well, I gotta split. Time to get back to my day job. As Nathan says in the book,

“Someone has to handle the bodies.”

MY DARKEST PRAYER is available January 1st, 2019 wherever books are sold!